Patrick Fergus
@Fergus5Fergus
A castoff box of tapes containing old recordings of the Springfield College Glee Club and band sat in the school’s Archives for years on end. It was far from the first place to search when looking for a unique piece of the school’s history with the Civil Rights Movement.
Imagine the great surprise of Springfield’s Archivist Jeffrey Monseau when, in 2009, he opened a stored recording of the college’s 1964 commencement ceremony, one that contained the audio of a speech long thought of as lost.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the graduating class on Sunday, June 14, and now his distinctive timbre and powerful message could finally be heard, nearly 50 years later.
“We had no idea it existed, and I just happened to stumble upon it,” said Monseau. “By having the audio, you’re able to compare the [transcript] to verify that what was written is actually what was said.”
Prior to the discovery of the tape, the speech had been preserved through transcription, but the words alone didn’t truly convey the essence of King’s allocution.
“Having that audio just makes the speech that much more powerful,” Monseau said.
King discussed the social revolution that was bringing about “a structural change in the architecture of the national and international society in which we live,” further addressing poverty and the need for comradeship, repeating his famous adage, “We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish together as fools.”
Because the audio was set up to record the band, King’s voice is distant. Monseau even took the recording to a sound engineer in Florence, Massachusetts, to get as much sound of King’s voice as possible.
“You can tell when you listen to it, that the microphone is not sitting in front of him,” Monseau said. “There was actually a lot of work that was done…and worked through it multiple times.”
Professor of Communications Martin Dobrow has long studied and written about King’s commencement address on Alden Street, and saw the uncovering of the tape as a key addition to understanding the significance of the moment.
“I thought it was an astonishing archival find,” Dobrow said. “There was no apparent record [of the audio] of the speech until it was found.”
King’s journey, as Dobrow described in an article for the Triangle Magazine in 2004, was tumultuous. Just days before King was expected to arrive on campus, he was arrested in St. Augustine, Fla., for ordering at a whites-only establishment. He sat in the St. Johns County Jail for three days, contrasting the “beautiful setting” of the commencement to the jail in the opening lines of his speech.
There was also significant pressure from benefactors of the college to not have King speak. Springfield’s president at the time, Glenn A. Olds, rejected such pleas and, in fact, contacted law enforcement to attempt to have King released.
“It really is like King, at the apex of the Civil Rights Movement,” Dobrow said. “It’s a historically significant moment, not just on this campus, but really in the country. And so many storylines come together.”
For Dobrow, MLK’s speech served as not only the genesis for an upcoming Civil Rights Movement-centered book, but also a long-running lecture series on campus.
The 12th annual Martin Luther King Jr. lecture will be held on March 3 at 4 p.m. This year’s event is titled “MLK and the Current American Social and Political Landscape.” The panelists include State Sen. Adam Gomez, Danielle R. Holley and Shannon M. Rudder.
King’s brief stop on campus continues to be a defining moment for the college. One of the most influential Americans speaking at a very critical time, delivering a powerful message that still holds magnitude today.
Photos by Patrick Fergus/The Student